HBO’s ‘Real Time’ host Bill Maher, left, outed Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, right, on CNN’s ‘Larry King Live.’ CNN deleted the comments from rebroadcasts. The New York Times wrote about the incident but did not mention Mehlman by name. AP/HBO photos.
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By KERRY ELEVELD
Monday, November 20, 2006
Ken Mehlman, Chair-man of the Republican National Committee (RNC), had a rough election week. Republicans ceded control of Congress Nov. 7. He announced that he would step down from his post at the RNC that Thursday. And sandwiched between those two events was this bit on CNN’s "Larry King Live": "A lot of the chiefs of staff, the people who really run the underpinnings of the Republican Party, are gay. I don’t want to mention names…" said Bill Maher, host of HBO’s "Real Time."
Not a moment later, the name "Ken Mehlman" flew out of Maher’s mouth. Okay, the allegation was out on live TV, and Maher said he would name others on his upcoming show last Friday. But to the great disappointment of many (and, presumably, the relief of others) Maher failed to make good on his promise to out more Republican leaders.
The following Monday, pro-gay blogs such as Queerty.com declared, "Maher pussed out" even as the mother of mainstream publications, The New York Times, ran a story about Maher’s statements on CNN that steered clear of mentioning Mehlman’s name.
And so it was, the blogs of Generations X and Y going head-to-head with the old guard’s Grey Lady over the modern-day problem of how to cover an "outing."
"The old rules of journalism are really up in the air right now on every subject, but on no subject is it more glaringly obvious than in outing," said David Eisenbach, a U.S. history professor and author of "Gay Power: An American Revolution," which chronicles how gays and lesbians used media visibility to advance gay rights in the ’60s and ’70s.
Eisenbach said the outing of closeted gay people is becoming "the next wave" of the gay rights movement.
"This new generation of activist journalists—and that line now is totally blurred—is emerging as a political force," he said.
The public and private self that public officials could often keep separate in the past has been broken down by the fact that professional journalists and editors can no longer filter what enters the public sphere.
The dilemma for mainstream news outlets is how to remain relevant in cases where they are applying journalistic standards to the information they disseminate while cyberspace and water cooler chat is abuzz with questions of whether Ken Mehlman is gay.
No one is more aware of that challenge than Bill Mitchell, editor of the web site for the Poynter Institute, a school that teaches and promotes excellence in journalism.
Mitchell said the media is making a fundamental transition from the role of gatekeeper to that of standard setter.
"The one thing that differentiates traditional media from much of the blogosphere is the role of the editor," he said. "You can characterize it pejoratively as censoring, but when it’s done well, it has much more to do with intelligent selection and decisions that are based on relevance, fairness and accuracy."
Mitchell said there’s a real danger in publishing information about someone’s sexuality just because "it’s already out there" on something like "Larry King Live" or YouTube.com or The Huffington Post web site. He said at Poynter, they weigh the key values of trying to report the crux of the story while at the same time minimizing the amount of harm they do in exposing the personal details of someone’s life.
As journalists, Mitchell said, "We invariably almost always do some harm. The question is, How can we minimize that and at the same time tell as much of the story as we can?"
In the case of Mehlman, Mitchell said, "CNN was faced with a dilemma. What did they do?"
What they did was edit Maher’s comments out of the rebroadcast version that ran on the West Coast and later removed the transcript from the CNN web site.
The New York Times chose to report on the fact that CNN censored Maher’s speculation about the sexuality of some "high-ranking Republican officials," but it never mentioned Mehlman’s name.
Mitchell said the Times story struck a good balance. But just as he values the standards set by editors and journalists, David Eisenbach finds value in what he called "the ultra democratic world" of cyberspace. He said when someone posts something on the web, it either catches fire or it doesn’t based on how truthful it is.
"I can’t think of anyone getting hurt by a false rumor coming off the Internet," Eisenbach said. "It’s a marketplace, and if you’re trying to sell a lousy product in a free market, it won’t get the customers."
Weighing the benefits
The marketplace worked in the case of former Rep. Mark Foley, who resigned after ABC News revealed sexually inappropriate e-mails and instant messages he had sent to teenage pages on Capitol Hill. Initially, ABC didn’t feel confident enough about the information they had on Foley to run an on-air story, so they posted a story to their web site. Within 24 hours, they were flooded with corroborating information from former pages.
Eisenbach added that the new rash of "outings" is good for the movement, showing people that gays and lesbians are everywhere.
"The more people see that gays cannot be pigeonholed and cannot be dismissed, the more people will begin to accept the equality of homosexuals," he said.
Since Foley resigned and admitted his sexuality in early October, sexual orientation questions have been leveled at Idaho Sen. Larry Craig, Colorado Rev. Ted Haggard and Ken Mehlman.
But even as gay activists seek to normalize homosexuality by making more people visible, the very people they are exposing are likely to be engaged in seedy activities because they are in hiding. The closet corrupts, as people say.
Chris Crain, co-founder of Window Media and former executive editor of this paper’s sister publication, The Washington Blade, is leery of going on witch hunts to expose people’s sexuality, from both a journalistic standpoint and for the sake of the movement.
As journalists, Crain said, it is always okay to ask a public figure about their sexuality and report the answer. That is what the Washington Blade has done with questions about Mehlman’s sexuality over the past couple years.
"We asked him the question, and we reported when other people asked him the question," said Crane. Mehlman did not answer questions about his sexuality at the time, neither confirming nor denying that he was gay. But recently he has stated that he is not gay.
Crain, who attended law school with Mehlman and worked with him on the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, said he does not have any personal knowledge of Mehlman’s sexuality.
"We never reported that additional information was out there because we were never aware of it," Crain said. He said that journalists have to make a judgment call about how deep they are willing to dig into someone’s personal life in order verify that information.
If a person lives with his boyfriend and goes to gay bars with him and holds his hand, Crain reasoned, that the information is not that private. If several people claim they have had sex with someone, more digging is required. If someone simply claims someone is gay, there’s a lot of digging to be done.
"I definitely think [Ken Mehlman’s] sexual orientation is newsworthy, but is it newsworthy enough?" Crain said. "I don’t think it’s justified as journalists or right as a movement to go that far into someone’s private sexual life to prove to the world they’re a hypocrite."
Crain said he understood "the huge degree of psychological satisfaction" for gay people when someone like the Rev. Haggard, who championed anti-gay marriage amendments in Colorado, is revealed to have had gay sex.
But he added that the revelation may have influenced the elections.
"I actually think it turned a lot of people off in Colorado. It brought up all this sleaze about this guy hiring a prostitute and using crystal meth when he’s got a family and kids," Crain said.
Colorado voters ended up passing an anti-gay marriage amendment, but they failed to pass another measure that provided domestic partnership rights to gays and lesbians. Polls had suggested the domestic partner bill stood a good chance of passing.
"I think people should give some thought even as activists—put the journalism side apart—as to just how much they really advance the cause by outing hypocrites," Crain said.
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